Tsada proposal

Brief Outline
It’s a proposal that needs to be developed. I envision an installation made from video, slide projections, photographs and objects. It’s a project about presenting myself through the big Other, my Grandfather. How it affected my perception, my identity, my understanding.
What I want to do is shoot videos of my memories, real and fictional. It will be like a home video archive, that I don’t really have, about the events that happened and never happened… I would have to find girls of different ages that would look like me and film in different places like Tsada village, my great grandfathers house, and my grandfathers house in Makhachkala …in the end I see several films (home-video style) and several slide projections. Changing slides of different objects from my grandfather’s house and childhood photos-where I would photoshop myself into the images I was not meant to be in…
I’m thinking of playing out the role of my grandfather in those videos myself, I’m thinking of doing the same thing with my great grandfather, becoming them for some time. Walking around the house as him, writing poetry in his study, laughing, talking to a little girl (an actress that would be playing me in one of the videos).

Emotion Behind the Project
To imitate a memory I don’t want to forget and to record in video the memory I craved for. It all has to do with a fact that I remember things differently than other people in that same situation. In a way it is a licence for a lived experience, justification, video as a proof, justification for my memory. Its a way of capturing those memory flashes that one gets, capturing and adding to them. I remember a voice, an image, or a detail, a short frame, I want to build a video sculpture around those fragmented memories…add plaster of imaginary to a fragment of real.

Beeing transformed into my grandfather is an act of longing and a desire of becoming him, that I always had, since I have been very little. Having his achievements, simulating his mind, having a chance to say things to myself beeing him. Its probably as deep as self-deception can get, but on the other hand this deception will be a resolution of my own ambitions.

Principal medium: Video and photography
Location(s) of production: Dagestan (Russia)
Production budget indication: less than £3,500